Мингазова Ф.К. Sosiology reader

aggressive policing, which has resulted in increased use of force, mass incarceration, and brutality. The conflict between the antiviolence movement's strategy and the experiences of low-income communities of color has seriously undermined our work as feminists of color fighting violence against women.

Obviously, leadership emerges as central to this dilemma. While there is a renewed call for unity and diversity from some corners of our movement, others (women of color who have dedicated years to this work) are appalled at the persistent whiteness of the nationally recognized leadership.

As the bureaucratic and institutional apparatus of the antiviolence movement grows - bringing more funding, more recognition, and also more collaborations with partners who do not share our radical goals - there is little evidence of increasing racial/ethnic and class diversity. Despite some notable exceptions, the lack of women of color in leadership roles in antiviolence programs is startling and contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of inclusion, diversity, and commitment to antioppression work. While there may be structural excuses for this, the fact that so few national organizations (even feminist ones) have successfully promoted the leadership of women of color is almost a mockery of the values on which the movement was built. Given the similar invisibility of women of color as leaders in struggles for racial justice (again, with some exceptions), the situation can seem dire as we face the new millennium.

Yet, for better or worse, the solutions are not enigmatic; they exist within our core values and the principles on which the antiviolence movement was organized. Feminist women of color need to step forward as never before, reclaiming our place as leaders both in the antiviolence movement and in struggles for gender equality in our communities. The antiviolence movement needs only to acknowledge the contradictions between its rhetoric and practice and to deal honestly with the hypocrisy in its work. As members of a social justice movement committed to ending oppression, we must reconsider the complexity of rendering justice by paying attention to specific vulnerabilities of race and class. As we claim victories on some very important fronts, our understanding of gender oppression must be broadened to include state-sanctioned abuse and mistreatment of women. If we are prepared to go there, we can begin the millennium ready to face the really hard, radical work of ending violence against women - for each and any woman.

From “American families”. A multicultural reader. Second edition, 2008. Edited by Stephanie Coontz with Maya Parson and Gabrielle Raley.

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revolutionary character requiring a radical breaking up of the social structure. Whenever morality lagged behind the real conditions of society, it was only necessary, he considered, to bring it into accord with the changed structure, and no more.

The idea of the determination of morality by a stable social structure led Durkheim to moral relativism. If all the forms of morality were conditioned identically by the existing structure, they were identically legitimate and there were no objective criteria for recognising the superiority of any one of them.

Underlying a social crisis, which (he considered) was mainly of a moral nature, was a change in the character and content of the collective consciousness. A rapid change of standards and values entailed a loss of past discipline and order in society. The morality of individualism was not yet established as the main social value and content of the collective conscience. The organic solidarity of modern society did not exclude a lack of rules of behaviour, and lack of standards. Modern society was therefore put into moral disorder and experienced social strife. The way out of the crisis was to strengthen moral regulation.

In Durkheim's conception the state, which thinks and acts for all the rest of society, was the main agency fulfilling the function of «collective mind» and defender of collective interests. He treated the role of the state in the spirit of liberalism, but foresaw the possibility of an excessive strengthening and hypertrophy of its functions at the expense of the individual's interests. The individual should be defended against extreme state control by «secondary» or intermediate social groups (religious, production, etc.). In line with that Durkheim put forward the idea of special, particular moral codes regulating the behaviour of individuals as members of corresponding social groups, argued the need for historical study of these codes, and developed the idea of the relativity of the moral requirements accepted in various professional

circles. At the same time he called for the establishing of a rigid hierarchy of moral rules according to their social importance. Family, professional, and civil morality shaped the hierarchical structure, at whose pinnacle were the universal values and ideas embodied in the state. Durkheim reproduced the Comtean idea of the state as an agency of universal reconciliation and moral regulation of the interests of all the members of society, irrespective of the social and class content of those interests.

The conception of an unconditional hierarchy of moral standards had a formal character and was aimed at maintaining stability of the social order.

In Durkheim's view a person's moral behaviour had three main, inherent features: a sense of discipline, membership of a group, and autonomy. He

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ascribed rather more significance to moral discipline and control, in essence equating discipline and morality. Only a human being was capable of consciously following discipline and only through that did freedom become possible. The social essence of morality was embodied in the feature of «group membership», and the idea of conscious, voluntary observance of social prescriptions in «autonomy».

Durkheim connected his interpretation of the social functions of morality directly with the theory of education. The aim of education and upbringing was to mould a social being, to develop those qualities and properties of a child's personality that society needed. It was the business of education to transform the egoistic, unsocial creature that a child was initially, by the most effective means, into another being, capable of leading a moral and social life.

His treatment of the moral problems of modern times was based on his anthropological theory, and the conception of the duality of human nature, the conception of HOMO duplex.

Man's social nature, created throught education (standards, values, ideals) was contradictted by his biological nature (capabilities, biological functions, impulses, and passions). That made for incessant inner disquiet, and a sense of tension and alarm. Only society`s controlling activity restrained man's biological nature and his passions and appetites, and put them into a certain context. When society relaxed its control over the individual, rose a state of the disintegration of society and the individual. In that social state there was no firm moral control of individual behaviour, and a kind of moral vacuum was created in which the old standards and values no longer played their role, and new ones had not yet been confirmed. This state opposed the moral order, regulation, and control that characterised the normal, «healthy» state of society.

In his The Division of Labor Durkheim considered anomy from the aspect of social structure, explaining it by lack of co-ordination of social functions from the growth and development of society. In Suicide he treated anomy as a moral crisis in which the system of normative control of individual needs and passions was disrupted through social upheavals, which led to loss of personal balance, and the feeling of belonging to a group, and to loss of discipline and social solidarity. Deviant behaviour was also a consequence of that.

Durkheim believed, in Utopian fashion, that individual and social needs could be consciously regulated, and kept within the context of limitations dictated by the real social possibilities, while preserving capitalist social

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relations» That would prevent the rise of tension, spiritual crisis, feelings of

for the genesis of morality was positive; so, too, was his analysis of the functional consequences of moral rules for society, and his recognition of their socio-cultural inconstancy, on the one hand, and universality, on the other. The sociological interpretation of morality was very fruitful in principle, but Durkheim's conception was too abstract and one-sided. His arguments for society as the sole worthy moral goal were unsubstantiated and weak. One can hardly deny, for example, the moral value of the personality and of its harmonious development. And although Durkheim recognised and actively defended the rights and dignity of the individual, his theory did not allow him to examine the interaction of the individual and society dialectically in concrete historical conditions. The principle of the unconditional superiority of society over the individual was unsound. Abstract unhistorical collectivism was just as unjustified as the abstract individualism that he constantly criticised. The relation of the individual and society, considered from the moral aspect, cannot be reduced to a relation of subordination. The relation between them is one of dialectical interaction.

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Read the article and write an abstract.

Gendered Activities, gender difference, gender exclusion by Dr. Michael Sosteric Dec 06, 2012

We all see the world through eyes colored by the psychological imposition of gender. Girls are girls and boys are boys and never the twain shall meet. We think what we see is natural reality, but is it really? Sociologists would argue, not so. In truth, gender is less about physical reality and more about social control, the status quo, and power. At birth we are put in little gender boxes and these boxes limit us, and control us. Something to think about in the pink and blue world of modern life.

As sociologists, one of our (my wife and I) biggest pet peaves is gendered activities. These are activities where an individual is excluded from participation based on a superficial external sexual characteristic. You know the drill right? Only boys allowed! Only girls allowed. You can’t come in

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because you have a vagina. You aren’t allowed because you got a penis. It is exclusion and sorting based on sex and gender and to be honest and frank, as two counselors and social scientists working on healing the damage done by patriarchy, and trying to create a saner and just world, it’s a real annoyance.

Why?

Well, because gender based exclusion, one sex only activity, is quite literally the root of all female (and male) oppression in this world. We’ll stop short of saying it is the root of all evil because as we all know, the root of all evil is love of money. But it is definitely the root of all gender based oppression.

Now we know that’s a pretty bold statement, but bare with us for a moment. We all know that women are not treated equally in this world right? That’s the reality! Women perform 60% of work world wide, they earn 10% of income, and own 10% of the land (Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 2003:243). Women are segregated into pink collar occupations, enjoy less financial stability, lower rates of pay, and are generally expected to sacrifice their career paths to raise the family while their men get ahead. Women are generally left at home to raise the children (an incredibly difficult and demanding job) with minimal help from their spouses and ironically, this is true even in relationships where the male and female are overtly egalitarian. You can go into a marriage with very high ideals but when the babies come, traditional scripts tend to come into play and it is the women who are the ones who bear the primary responsibility. Of course, take five or six or ten years off your career path to raise children and what do you get? Less raises and fewer promotions! It is a sacrifice that we have to make when we raise children, but it’s almost always the woman who makes that sacrifice. Ironically, this sacrifice can come back and slap ya in the face when the kids grow up, the marriage breaks up, and the female who made the career sacrifice is left with nothing but the pink collar ghetto. As a result of the “sacrifices” they make, women experience higher rates of depression, poverty, and social stigma. And not only that, women and girls are victims of spousal abuse and sexual violence far more often than men. Globally, around the world, women are oppressed and there is no denying that. If you were born female, you are born with a social and economic handicap that is going to make your life a lot harder than it needs to be if genders were treated equally.

And why is this?

Well, there are a lot of reasons why it happens but if you ask us it all comes down to the fact that we (and by “we” we mean the people of this

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earth) have convinced ourselves that boys and girls are significantly different on an emotional, intellectual, even spiritual bases. Boys are like this, girls are like that. Boys play with trains, girls play with dolls. Boys are the breadwinners, girls are the nurturers. Boys are stronger, girls are weaker. If you think about it long enough you’ll probably come up with a hundred oppositional differences between boys and girls.

And how is this related to gender oppression?

Well think about it for a moment. When you believe that there are significant differences between boys and girls, men and women, you have a ready made JUSTIFICATION for just about any gender based inequality, exclusion, or oppression that you might want to think of.

•Why do women (why should they) stay home and look after the babies?

•Because girls are different!

•They are the ones who nurture.

•Why can’t girls be doctors?

•Because boys are different!

•They are smarter and more capable.

•Why don’t men participate more in cooking?

•Because men are different.

•They like mechanical things while girls like to bake.

•Why don’t women get paid as much as men?

•Because they are different.

•They aren’t as motivated or committed as men are.

•Why don’t women get promoted as fast?

•Because they are different.

•Why can’t women be priests in the catholic church?

•Because they are different.

In order to justify and support gender inequality and oppression all you have to do is invoke gender difference. It is that way because boys are girls are different.

Of course at this point some of you will be thinking, well the gendersare different. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls. Girls are emotional, irrational, weak. Boys are tough, strong, achievers. Girls like dolls, boys like cars (though tell that to Danica Patrick). Girls are like this, boys are like that. Honestly though, all that’s a load of pseudo-scientific horseshit. There’s really no “scientific” basis to suggest that boys are all that much different than girls. For one, the scientific academy has a huge gender bias that makes any scientific defense of gender differences useless and

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indefensible. And you can’t argue this. When I did my psychology undergraduate degree twenty years ago, we knew there was a bad gender bias in psychology and psychologists knew they had to do something about it. Sad thing is, they didn’t! In fact after twenty or thirty years of awareness, the gender bias is still there. As much as they may not like to hear it, psychologist are still referencing reality on the basis of their gender perceptions and worse still, they are justifying their bias. In the article linked above the psychologist actually defends scientific methodology suggesting that when it comes to identifying gender bias, science works. But clearly it does not. If scientific methodology has been unable to make much progress against gender bias in research over the last thirty years, if gender bias still exists, how can anybody make a claim that science works or can provide us with valid knowledge about gender. The conclusions are methodologically straight forward. If there is a systematic bias in the research on gender, the research on gender is not valid. And if after thirty years the bias is still there, then it may certainly be fair to suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we approach gender in science. Certainly it is more reasonable to suggest that than to say, despite the presence of bias, “it’s working.”

A second reason that you can’t really believe science when it comes to gender is the bell curve, or rather our misuse of the bell curve. As you all know, the bell curve is a graphed distribution of “characteristics.” You can put anything you want on a bell curve from height and weight to IQ to hair color. When you do that, or rather when you put the sampling means on a graph, you often get what a statistician calls a “normal” distribution. This normal distribution shows the purported distribution of characteristics in a population.

Now, there’s a lot of problems when it comes to using the normal distribution to describe human characteristics but putting those aside for now, what we notice when we graph male and female characteristics on a bell curve is not difference but similarity. You can look at the example graph in this article showing the height and weight of humans differentiated by gender and ask yourself, what do you see. Do you see the little bit of difference in the tails of the distribution, bend to the statistical indoctrination, and tell yourself the difference is highly significant, or do you look at the amazing overlap? In my view, when you consider the height and weight of male and female what is most striking are the similarities. That is, we are more alike than we are different. Yet if you were a psychologist, or a pop culture pundit, or a chauvinistic male, you might highlight the difference (perhaps because talking about difference makes it look like you’ve actually discovered something) without ever commenting on the similarity. It is a bit odd when you

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think about it. While it is true there may be difference in the extremes in abilities, sometimes, really what is so remarkable about the genders is their similarities. The truth is, male or female, we all have two arms, two legs, two eyes, an identical looking brain, an intellect, emotions, feelings, and all the things that make us human. We would argue that it is not our differences that are important (though admittedly they can be a lot of fun), it is our similarities and these similarities far outweigh any superficial sexual characteristics that might differentiate us.

Of course, the pseudo-scientific clap trap about gender differences, or the fact that we all chose to focus on difference rather than similarity, isn’t the main point here. The main point is that once you do that, once you allow for the idea that men and women are significantly different (even though it’s their similarities that are arguably more remarkable) then you have created the necessary ideological support (i.e. the rationalization and justification) for gender oppression on this planet. You buy into that dichotomy, you become the oppressor (even if you are the sex being oppressed). It really is as simple as that.

And what does this have to do with gendered activity? Well, gendered activity is the prototypical gender oppression. It is the prototypical exclusion upon which all other exclusions are based. Of course, I understand you might have a hard time swallowing this. I mean, what does a girl’s only baby shower, or a boy’s only hockey club, have to do with the suppression of women on this planet? Well, everything because once you polarize the genders, once you create a distinction, once you allow exclusion and sorting based on difference, then it becomes possible to rank, and sort, and organize and deny and exclude along any other indices you can care to think about. If you say, only girls can play or only boys can play then by default you give legitimacy to the mythology of gender difference. And if you give legitimacy to the myth of gender difference, then you have provided support for the reality of gender oppression. Of course, you may not like to hear this. You may be sitting comfortably in a life organized around gender based activities, but that doesn’t change the fact that if that is your life, then you are supporting the gender based oppression of women on this planet, even if you don’t want to. It is exactly like the feminists say, the personal is political.

So what are you going to do about it? Well, if you are a male and you have a wife, or a sister, or a mother, or a daughter, and you are interested in seeing them treated equally in this world, then you have to stop thinking about gender differences, stop supporting gendered activities, and start working towards gender inclusion. If you do anything else you are a part of

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the problem, and a component of the oppression. If you need help, take a page out of this grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no (http://www.tolerance.org/activity/peer-exclusion)

Problem: Sometimes a group of children won’t let another kid play with them just because of their gender. Gender is whether you are a boy or a girl. Sometimes boys will say that a girl can’t play with them. Sometimes girls will say that boys can’t play with them.

Rationale: This isn’t nice. It is wrong to exclude someone just because they are a boy or a girl, or because of their gender. Not letting someone play with you just because of their gender is called bullying, and bullying is not allowed…

If you are a female and you don’t like the social, political, economic and (even) spiritual inequality that becomes possible when we allow gender difference and gender exclusion, if you don’t like the idea of maybe one day finding yourself on the wrong end of a glass ceiling, submerged in a pink collar ghetto, or crying as your husband of twenty years, whom you sacrificed your entire life and career for, leaves you to go hang with a younger female because “that’s what men do,” then take a page out of the same grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no. You can’t say “you can’t play just because you’re a boy.”

And just to be clear, just because you are female doesn’t give you free pass. You don’t get to engage gender inclusions and then complain about the sorry state of this world, or your life, or your daughter’s awful marriage to that “typical male,” down the road. The personal is political and change starts with you.

Oh an incidentally, everything we’ve said here about gender difference and exclusion applies equally well to ageism, racism, or any of the other exclusions, based on difference, that make the inequality of this world go around. As long as we keep thinking of ourselves as different and not as a unified human race, as long as we hang onto our “we and they” mentality (however we choose to spin that), we create the wedge that allows the inequality that causes the suffering that ruins the lives of the vast majority of people on this earth.

References:

1. Eitzen, D. Stanley and Maxine Baca-Zinn. 2003 Social Problems. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Resources: http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/gendered- activities/

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